Together – part two
This video interweaves the mobility of defiance against national-colonial borders and the collection of gossips by Southeast Asian migrants in Berlin. It proposes the idea of finding a commonality via daily conversations within a safe space/relationship (between media-makers and subjects), as a way of activating the living archives. It exemplifies how archive-making within the current audiovisual world could be executed beyond colonial categories and nationalities.
This contribution is published in the framework of the Whole Life Academy.
Connected Material
Epistolary narrative, dialogism, intertextuality, speculative narrative — we imagine this text to be letters between the two of us across different temporalities, making use of a speculative and fragmented narrative in line with the themes we explore in our work: archiving the unarchivable, emotions, memories, and other human conditions within the horizon of extinction.
The legacy of anti-colonial leader and Pan-Africanist revolutionary Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973) still calls for cultural readings, and not strictly political ones. Contemporary art, so-called “artistic research” and critical theory will benefit from a cross-disciplinary approach which puts Cabral as relevant to art or which turns Cabral’s many contributions into tools.
Interrogating the archive of “green” extractivism is not just about uncovering access to knowledge, legal knowledge, for example, that can help expose (ecological and economic) crime and that can thus be a starting point for empowering true alternatives and thus alternative ways of living and organizing economic processes. It is also about creating a resonant space for shared thinking and reflection.
Accumulation and multiplication of images is an accumulation of the hidden histories behind them. How do we recover these invisible histories?
Scanning the Horizon works with and towards the seemingly unattainable, yet powerfully generative utopian demands of queer life set out on the horizon.
In search of a polyphony that speaks to the ecologies, nightmares, poisons and antidotes that come to assemble an Archive for the Eleventh Hour.
What does it mean to do archival research in embodied ways? Where is ‘the archive’ located in such an approach? And how might the open form of ‘the score’—a provisional map, a musical or performance score, a speculative cartography, an image atlas, a set of instructions—offer possibilities for articulating and transmitting the knowledge of elusive archives?
Beyond the objects in any given archive is a myriad of people, encounters and exchanges. The desire to locate the human element beneath archives is challenged by new technology. As part of ‘Life Stories and Archives’, we began a virtual ‘common archive’. Our collaborative thread addresses pertinent questions arising from shared interests in how individual’s origins, biases, networks and political struggles fuel the need to collect.
An open-source, collaborative diary for creating archival alliances. We identify “commoning the archive” as a disobedient, decolonized, autonomous, subversive, and rogue practice. Hereby, we can approach it as a collective mnemonic practice.
This essay explores the ways in which the counter-archive is animated through networks of people across time and place, as material is shared, presented and recontextualised, using the solidarity film-screening “Beyrouth plusieurs fois”, that was developed after the 2020 explosions in Beirut, as an example.